This keeps Company A, for example, from charging you for ESPN, but lets you use their own sports site for free. Don’t think it won’t happen. Once the nation is 100 percent wired for broadband, competition will keep prices low, so content will be the only way to grow revenue.

Comcast, the cable company in question, was trying to play ball with media companies and limit the ability of customers to share files, via systems such as Bit Torrent, since much of that activity involves copyrighted material and is done illegally.

In this case, the cable companies won the battle, but they may have lost the war. Sans the ability to force net neutrality on the providers, the FCC’s only other option is to re-classify the companies as more heavily-regulated telecom services.

Comcast, in other words, probably screwed itself.

Oops.

“Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order,” said (Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press, which is pushing for net neutrality). “And they sliced right through the FCC’s arm and plunged the ax